Thursday, June 28, 2007

So, I've held off making political posts here, in case they'd offend anyone who just wanted to read the latest Tolkien bits I was working on. But there's so much going on that now seems a good time to start commenting on it. Those not interested in the sad state of US politics are advised to skip this one.

We recently got a gift subscription to TIME, and since the issues had been piling up I've been making a concerted effort to read through them so they can move on to recycling. Some things stand out: for example, the magazine is much more conservative than I remember it, certainly more conservative than NEWSWEEK is these days. Given its history, this should not be surprising, but it's just another example of how easy it is to buy into the myth of the 'liberal media'.

Of particular interest, in a horrifying train-wreck sort of way, is the brief piece that appeared a few weeks back on Congressman Tancredo, one of the minor candidates running for the Republican nomination this year. Until recently, I've know very little about him, and was happy to keep it that way, but as he'd no doubt hoped taking part in the debates has raised his profile and given him a platform for spreading his ideas.* Here are a few gems from his Q&A in TIME:

--he doesn't think climate change is caused by human activity, but claims that opposing immigration is environmentally sound ("if a person moves here from another country, they automatically become bigger polluters")

--he thinks we shouldn't have a national identity card, because that smacks of the Mark of the Beast (yes, I'm paraphrasing, but he genuinely did bring up the Book of Revelations imagery). However, every citizen should have "a Social Security card that can't be fraudulently reproduced" (comment: this is like having money that can't be counterfeited or a web immune to hackers or a missile-defense system that can't be sabotaged: pious nonsense that can't be made to happen in the real world)

--"we should have a moratorium on all immigration--legal or not--for at least three years . . . an immigration time-out . . . in order to assimilate the people who have come here already" (not even the Alien & Sedition Acts, which have been notorious for over two hundred years, went this far. welcome to a new low in the history of our country)

--his solution to immigrants picking crops? Genetically engineer food so machines can harvest them instead. He specifically praises tomatoes with "tougher skins [that] could be picked by machine" as a move in the right direction. This one is a double whammy: he both advocates replacing people with machines ("a reduction in low-wage workers") to eliminate jobs AND would rather see our food tampered with than allow immigrants to work agricultural jobs.

--finally, though it doesn't come up in this piece, it's good to keep in mind that he's one of the three Republican candidates who went on record as not believing in Evolution.

Conclusion: it's just barely possible he might ride an anti-immigrant wave into the vice presidency, just as Nixon managed to ride McCarthyism into a spot alongside Eisenhower on the 1952 ticket, but I doubt it. Tancredo's breed of xenophobia would have been mainstream Republicanism in the 1920s, but today it's an ugly throw-back, like David Dukes' brief political career in the 1980s. Well before the election he'll have slunk back into the hole he crawled out of. Ultimately he'll probably wind up being a right-wing pundit, a la Buchanan (a fellow anti-immigrant isolationist).

We'll see

--JDR

*I maintain that there are three types of presidential candidates: (1) Those who are running because they think they might actually win, like Edwards, Obama, Clinton, McCain, Romney, & Guiliani; (2) those who are running for vice president though they won't admit it, like Huckabee and Tommy Thompson and Dodds; and (3) those like Tancredo who are running as 'issue' candidates, with no hope of winning the nomination but hoping to raise their profile so they'll become sought-after spokesmen for their pet causes, which worked well in the past for Kucinich and Sharpton and, God knows, Jesse Jackson.

Yesterday while walking the cats I had a strange thought: what if Tolkien did, in fact, complete the Silmarillion? As part of the preparation for my Marquette paper, I've been mulling over the need to periodically revisit the conventional wisdom in a field (e.g., Tolkien studies) in order to see if it needs recasting in light of further evidence. Certainly a number of the standard beliefs about THE HOBBIT dating from the time of Carpenter's biography in the late 1970s -- that it was begun in the 1920s, that it was abandoned in the early '30s and the final chapters only written just before publication, that it was originally unconnected to the legendarium -- proved either flat wrong or at the very least extremely problematic in the light of close scrutiny. What of our other assumptions might need adjusting?

In the case of the Silmarillion, the obvious answer is that unlike THE HOBBIT or THE LORD OF THE RINGS JRRT never finished the stories of the First Age to his satisfaction, as Christopher Tolkien's outstanding and painstaking presentation of the unfinished texts of THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, the various Long Lays of Beleriand (most notably the Lay of Leithian), the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, and the 1951 Later Silmarillion make clear (HME I-II, III, V, & X-XI). But the newly-released completed presentation of the Turin story, THE CHILDREN OF HURIN, makes clear that 'The Silmarillion' did not for Tolkien comprise the whole of the legendarium. Instead, Christopher argues that the 1926 Sketch of the Mythology, the 1930 Quenta, and the unfinished 1937 Quenta Silmarillion were all essentially 'summarising' works (CHILDREN OF HURIN p.274-275), drawn in brief from longer works telling specific parts of the story in much greater detail (and greater dramatic immediacy). In fact, if I understand him properly, Christopher suggests that his father's not having completed those longer works may in turn have prevented him from completing the synoptic Silmarillion that was to summarize them and place all the 'great tales' into proper context with each other.

If this is the case -- that is, if we think of 'the Silmarillion' as a synoptic work, rather than as the grand encompassing account of the First and Second Ages that so many of us who first read it in 1977 took it for -- then the case can be made that Tolkien did complete a publishable version of the book back in 1930 or very shortly thereafter (that is, during the same period when he was starting THE HOBBIT). For in THE SHAPING OF MIDDLE-EARTH (HME.IV), there are clear indications that he at that time thought of The Silmarillion as comprised of three component parts: the (Earliest) Annals of Valinor, the (Earliest) Annals of Beleriand, and the Quenta Noldorinwa (i.e., the 1930 Quenta) -- see HME.IV.284. Both annals, although later much revised, existed in complete draft form and the Quenta itself in a fairly polished typescript. And what's more, this form of the 'book' provided a firm basis of all his subsequent Middle-earth works, from THE HOBBIT on, with the possible exception of the Numenor material, which essentially represented a new element entering the legendarium from a different angle.

So there it is: Tolkien is often criticized for his failure to complete works, but I think it was more ambition and unrestrained creativity than uncertainty or procrastination that were responsible -- witness the ambitious expansion of the fairly compact 1930 Quenta into the much more expansive 1937 QS (which he was forced to abandon in order to concentrate on 'the New Hobbit', i.e. LotR), the decision to insert a half-dozen or more chapters into THE LOST ROAD, each of which would recap the main theme of the opening and closing chapters within a new setting (before he'd written the grand finale), &c. And we tend not to give him due credit for the major works he did complete.

So, perhaps it's better not to say Tolkien 'never completed The Silmarillion' and instead to say that, having completed it, he found himself periodically compelled to revisit and revise and greatly expand it, and that he never brought these revisions to final form.

Just a thought.

--JDR

current reading: GEMSTONE OF PARADISE: THE HOLY GRAIL IN WOLFRAM'S PARZIVAL by Fr. G. Ronald Murphy.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Now that Peter Lane's book THE CATENIAN ASSOCIATION 1908-1983: A MICROCOSM OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHOLIC MIDDLE CLASS [1982] has arrived and I've had a chance to skim it, I find that there are three references to Tolkien within:

(1) page 137: ". . . there was the call by Grand Presidents and Provincial Councils for Circles to be on their guard, when enrolling new men, to ensure that men of the right 'quality' were enrolled rather than men in 'quantity'. Certainly the Association enrolled some distinguished men in this dire period [1923-1939]: there were academics such as Bodkin of Birmingham, Tolkien of Oxford, Phillimore of Edinburgh and Dixon of North Lancs, which at a completely different level there were the Test cricketers Andy Sandham of Croydon and 'Patsy' (christened Elias) Hendren of West London, who entertained many a Circle with their cricketing stories."

(2) page 153: "So, although wartime difficulties led to some Circles . . . being deprived of their Charters [through lack of unevacuated members], those very difficulties in the shape of evacuation led to expansion elsewhere. And another Circle which owed its origin, in part, to evacuation was Oxford, where many Colleges were taken over by various government departments. The opening of the Oxford Circle in October 1944 was notable, at least with hindsight, for the initiation of Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) and Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, the Founder Vice-President. In the light of the current interest in Tolkien's work, one would have wished for a recording of the speeches at the second annual dinner of the Oxford Circle, February 1945, when Tolkien proposed the toast to Provincial Council 'in a most amusing way which included an actual toast in Anglo-Saxon'. He was a member of the Association until 1956."

(3) page 160: "In October 1950, the Brothers of the Oxford Circle congratulated their former President, J.R.R. Tolkien, on the publication of THE HOBBIT, but could not have known that they were witnesses to the beginnings of a cult."

--As for the Catenian Association itself, it was (and is) a fraternal order like the Lions Club, Rotary, Optimists, Kiwanis, et al., only in this case drawing its membership from middle-class Catholic businessmen. It was founded in Manchester in 1908, and members originally referred to each other as "Chums", which to me sounds rather Babbitty and which I find rather hard to picture in Tolkien's case; I'm not sure if the habit persisted into the days of his membership. They were particularly interested in getting Catholic schools started, since there were far too few of these to meet the demand early in the century. The book does cast light on just how few Catholics there were in England at the time -- while the group reached Leeds as early as 1910 and Birmingham in 1912, before World War II there were too few Catholics in Oxford to organize or sustain a local chapter. I wonder if Tolkien might have been exposed to it during his years at Leeds (a period about which we know relatively little), but if so there's no mention of it here. According to Lane's account, Tolkien must have been v. active, since he not only helped found the Oxford chapter and served as its first Vice President but apparently also as its President at some point. We also now have the dates of his membership: 1944 (when the Oxford Circle began meeting) through 1956, though no reason is given for his dropping out. The detail about his being congratulated on THE HOBBIT in 1950 is curious, since this book was of course published back in 1937 and the second edition did not appear until 1951 (when it was released with little or no fanfare). He had finished THE LORD OF THE RINGS in 1949, but Lane's account specifies THE HOBBIT. A minor puzzle, but at least it shows that his fellow Catenians, then and now, appreciated his creative work.

Now that Peter Lane's book THE CATENIAN ASSOCIATION 1908-1983: A MICROCOSM OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHOLIC MIDDLE CLASS [1982] has arrived and I've had a chance to skim it, I find that there are three references to Tolkien within:

(1) page 137: ". . . there was the call by Grand Presidents and Provincial Councils for Circles to be on their guard, when enrolling new men, to ensure that men of the right 'quality' were enrolled rather than men in 'quantity'. Certainly the Association enrolled some distinguished men in this dire period [1923-1939]: there were academics such as Bodkin of Birmingham, Tolkien of Oxford, Phillimore of Edinburgh and Dixon of North Lancs, which at a completely different level there were th Test cricketers Andy Sandham of Croydon and 'Patsy' (christened Elias) Hendren of West London, who entertained many a Circle with their cricketing stories."

(2) page 153: "So, although wartime difficulties led to some Circles . . . being deprived of their Charters [through lack of unevacuated members], those very difficulties in the shape of evacuation led to expansion elsewhere. And another Circle which owed its origin, in part, to evacuation was Oxford, where many Colleges were taken over by various government departments. The opening of the Oxford Circle in October 1944 was notable, at least with hindsight, for the initiation of Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) and Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, the Founder Vice-President. In the light of the current interest in Tolkien's work, one would have wished for a recording of the speeches at the second annual dinner of the Oxford Circle, February 1945, when Tolkien proposed the toast to Provincial Council 'in a most amusing way which included an actual toast in Anglo-Saxon'. He was a member of the Association until 1956."

(3) page 160: "In October 1950, the Brothers of the Oxford Circle congratulated their former President, J.R.R. Tolkien, on the publication of THE HOBBIT, but could not have known that they were witnesses to the beginnings of a cult."

--As for the Catenian Association itself, it was (and is) a fraternal order like the Lions Club, Rotary, Optimists, Kiwanis, et al., founded in Manchester in 1908. Members originally referred to each other as "Chums", which to me sounds rather Babbitty and which I find rather hard to picture in Tolkien's case; I'm not sure if the habit persisted into the days of his membership. They were particularly interested in getting Catholic schools started, since there were far too few of these to meet the demand early in the century. The book does cast light on just how few Catholics there were in England at the time -- while the group reached Leeds as early as 1910 and Birmingham in 1912, before World War II there were too few middle-class Catholic businessmen in Oxford to achive critical mass

Friday, June 15, 2007

Now that TOLKIEN STUDIES vol. IV has arrived, I'm enjoying making my way through the reviews, which have the usual interesting match-ups between reviewer and topic reviewed. Having once myself written in a review that an author should be ashamed of herself for writing the book I was reviewing, I can appreciate a reviewer's being forced to confess that she finds one piece "a perfectly vile essay" (p. 247). But I was rather taken aback by Patrick Curry's piece on Dickerson and Evans's ENTS, ELVES, AND ERIADOR: THE ENVIRONMENTAL VISION OF JRRT, an investigation of JRRT's work as an expression of Catholic environmentalism -- not because his review is so negative (Curry wrote the only other significant book on Tolkien as an environmentalist, and objects to their exclusion of NeoPagan and New Age environmentalist thought) but because he gratuitously brings in Islam to make a point in a markedly jingoistic fashion.

Specifically, in response to Dickerson and Evans' statement that exploitation of nature is radically at odds with Christian faith, Curry retorts that this "is comparable to maintaining that Islam IS a religion of peace and Marxism IS a philosophy of liberation. They may be, metaphysically; and perhaps they should be, in earthly reality; but in effect, on the ground--where, I would say, it matters most--the truth of all three assertions should be radically doubted." (page 240). I take this to be D. and E. arguing that Xianity, properly understood, involves cherishing God's creation, and Curry responding that if so the record of Xians' stewardship is a poor one, but the form his rejoinder took surprised and dismayed me. The impulse to judge all other religions than your own by their worst manifestations is all too prevalent in the world today, but that doesn't mean we have to give in to it, and this seems a strange place to encounter it.

One unrelated question, from elsewhere in Curry's review: has Beorn struck anyone else as "ruthless[ly] Machiavellian" (p. 242)? I've read Machiavelli of course (including his play The Mandrake Root, which is rather fun) but I can't think of any application of the adjective 'Machiavellian' that I'd apply to the werebear; the only vaguely Machiavellian character I can think of in Tolkien offhand is the Master of Lake-Town, whose actions are wholly guided by self-interest (with ultimately disastrous results). Perhaps I just missed something, but seems an odd characterization of poor old Medwed/Beorn.

Just been taking stock at how many interesting books on Tolkien, or related to Tolkien studies, are coming out this year. We've already had THE COMPANY THEY KEEP by Diana Pavlac Glyer with David Bratman, the most important new book on The Inklings since Carpenter. Thanks to the newest issue of BEYOND BREE, I've just learned of ROOTS AND BRANCHES, a Walking Tree Press collection of more than twenty essays and speeches by Tom Shippey, which I of course ordered the next day. From Jessica Yates I learned that Shippey's other new book, a major study that has been in the works for a while, is now out: THE SHADOW-WALKERS: JACOB GRIMM'S MYTHOLOGY OF THE MONSTROUS, which revisits Grimm's seminal work TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY (which Tolkien seems to have dipped into for inspiration repeatedly). Finally, from Jason Fisher's new blog I found out about Dirk Vander Ploeg's QUEST FOR MIDDLE-EARTH, which tries to give Tolkien's Middle-earth a Van Daniken treatment. I suspect Ploeg might turn out to be the same person who published a rather strange piece I came across a while back in which he claimed to be of either elven or Numenorean descent (I forget which); we'll see.

And of course these, all out now, come in addition to two much-anticipated volumes coming in October: The Fleiger-Anderson edition TOLKIEN ON FAIRY-STORIES, which comes out in the U.K. on October 1st, and the Anderson-Burns collection of Tolkien's interviews ON TOLKIEN: INTERVIEWS, REMINISCENCES, and Other Essays, which is due out over here on October 21st.

And finally, thanks to Diana Pavlac Glyer for letting me know that the U.S. edition of my book is finally listed as orderable on amazon.com, with a release date of September 21st. It'll be available both as two individual volumes and in a boxed set containing both volumes of my book along with the new seventieth anniversary HOBBIT.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Yesterday had the rare treat of getting to see the new movie by one of my favorite directors. And, what's more, I got to see it in the theatre (the Varsity, on University Avenue in the U-District). And it was shown with the original dialogue, subtitled not dubbed, and I found out later that my favorite voice actress, Megumi Hayashibara, played the main character. It thus joins the very short list of anime I've seen on the big screen: SPIRITED AWAY, COWBOY BEBOP, HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE, and STEAMBOY. For those who enjoy Satoshi Kon's work and have not yet seen PAPRIKA, I cannot recommend it highly enough: it's classic Kon, clearly from the same mind that gave us PERFECT BLUE, MILLENNIUM ACTRESS, and especially PARANOIA AGENT; elements of TOKYO GODFATHERS are here as well, but muted. There's a reason Kon was recently named the best director working in anime after the legendary Hayao Miyazaki (who's in a league all by himself) by a major anime magazine (PROTOCULTURE ADDICTS #90, Jan/Feb 2007).*

First and foremost, this is surrealism done right. First it throws you in the deep end by showing the audience scenes from a policeman's recurring nightmare, then it explains clearly and simply what's going on (a scientist has invented a device that enables those who use it to enter other's dreams as an advanced form of psychotherapy; Paprika is a sort of guide who appears in the dreams and interacts with the dreamer), then it shows the rules it's just laid down start to come unhinged as the situation spirals out of control (someone has stolen several prototypes and uses them to force others into dream-states, with disastrous consequences as their victims sleepwalk out of high windows and the like; the devices also have unanticipated side-effects). As with PERFECT BLUE, things which happen only in the imagination are shown as if they were happening in the real world; as with PARANOIA AGENT, things from the dream world escape into reality, with dire consequences.

Second, this is the best superhero movie I've ever seen. The title character, Paprika, has a joie de vie that's an enormous contrast with the mopey comic book heroes of the last few decades (is there anyone out there who started reading comics after the 1960s who remembers when they used to be fun?). Although created as a persona within the dreamscape by the film's main character, Dr. Chiba (the super-competent scientist in charge of the project who's trying to clean up this mess and find out who within her team sabotaged the experiment), Paprika is quite unlike her real-world analogue: younger, more vivacious, mercurial. Within the dreamscapes, she can go almost anywhere and make herself over into almost anything within whatever environment she finds herself in, but she's not all-powerful, and frequently resorts to 'running away, terribly fast' when the situation calls for it.

Third, it's a suspenseful film that takes the time for character development: all the members of Dr. Chiba's team are vividly presented, from the mad scientist who invented the dream-device (a childlike whale of a man who's both a genius and utterly guileless) to Dr. Chiba herself, as is the detective who becomes ensnared in the case and of course Paprika herself. One reviewer compared it (favorably) to Gaiman, but it's far more fluid, less sinister, and considerably more entertaining than, say, MIRRORMASK. This is definitely one I'll be buying as soon as it becomes available over here; like PERFECT BLUE it'll reward repeated viewings. And, with a dvd, I'll be able to check something I almost missed at the end: a character going into a theatre passes by three posters. The third is an ad for TOKYO GODFATHERS, and I think the second was for MILLENNIUM ACTRESS, but I didn't catch the in-joke and look in time. I'm suspecting the first was for PERFECT BLUE, rounding out all three of Kon's previous films, but we'll see. I'll be wondering if the movie the character is going to see shows up as Kon's next project, but that's probably a little too neat.

Short version: classic Satoshi Kon, and a must-see for anyone interested in his work; highly recommended for fans of anime in general and also those interested in fantasy and science fiction.

--JDR

*Being named the best after Miyazaki is roughly equivalent to being named the best fantasy writer after Tolkien. Hideaki Anno, of EVANGELION fame, came in next after Kon.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Sometimes, you just have to take a break from your normal routine and do something a bit different. With me, this occasionally takes the form of reading something completely unrelated to anything I'm working on. Most recently, I just finished a book (#2668) about a Hawaiian singer with a fondness for recording shmaltzy old songs like "Wind Beneath My Wings", "Mona Lisa", "Wonderful World", and "Over the Rainbow" with ukulele accompaniment -- which is about as far as you can get from my own musical tastes. Fortunately, his life story is far more interesting to me than his music: here was someone about my own age (our birthdates are less than six months apart), with a lot of charisma and a lot of talent, who died from morbid obesity at age thirty eight, by which point he weighed about eight hundred pounds. He was literally a food addict, and it killed him; the account of his steadily increasing weight, from four hundred to seven hundred to finally eight hundred pounds, makes for painful reading, just as would the account of an alcoholic inexorable decay. But the music and food addiction are only part of the story; another theme running through the book is his gradual involvement in the 'Hawaiian Sovereignty' movement. I was not aware what a hot topic this is in Hawaii until our visit there last September; essentially, just as many dispersed native american tribes want to reclaim tribal lands and official recognition as a legal entity, so too some Hawaiians want to restore the Kingdom of Hawaii. This is more quixotic than it sounds, since pureblood Hawaiians are almost extinct: I've seen estimates that range from a low of 400 to a high of about 8,000 survivors (out of a total state population of about 1.3 million) -- of whom Kamakawiwo'ole himself was not one, it should be noted; his death certificate (reproduced on page 135) lists him as "Hawaiian/Japanese". Without knowing more about the context, I suspect his music should be ranked with Paul Revere's & the Raiders' "Indian Reservation (Cherokee People)" [1971] as something that helped raised cultural awareness of past injustices -- though in each case it was only part of a wider movement (e.g., in the case of American Indians, Dee Brown's BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE, one of those rare books that completely changes the worldview of any reader who pays attention). That wider spectrum ranged from those who wanted past injustices acknowledged (as Clinton did with the "Apology Bill" of 1993, which expressed regret for the US's role in overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy) to those who want to ignore the consequences of the last two centuries and pretend they just never happened. At any rate, an oblique look into an interesting subject I'll have to keep on the look-out for more on it from both sides.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Yesterday made a long-delayed trip down to Suzzallo-Allen to do a little research on the Marquette paper, which I started writing this week. Didn't have time to look up all the things I wanted, so concentrated on getting copies of what seem to be the very first pieces of scholarly criticism of Tolkien's work published, the two brief book reviews by his friend C. S. Lewis published in the TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (Oct. 2nd 1937) and the London TIMES (Oct. 8th). I had the text of the former thanks to Fr. Hooper's collection C. S. LEWIS ON STORIES (pages 81-82) but not the latter, although Doug Anderson quotes a goodly portion of it in THE ANNOTATED HOBBIT (rev. ed. page 18). It'd been far too many years since I'd last read it, so got to make the acquaintance of the library's new state-of-the-art microfilm reader -- which turns out to be just as touchy as any other microfilm reader, but with an impressive array of bells and whistles.

Of the two pieces, two things stand out. The first is that whereas in the TLS piece Lewis mainly compares THE HOBBIT to Lewis Carroll's ALICE books (taking a hint, most likely, from the blurb on the dust jacket; see LETTERS OF JRRT p. 21), in the TIMES piece it's Grahame's THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS instead that dominates. The second is a matter of context. For me, the significant thing about those two issues was the appearance there of these two pieces, but of course they are merely small items nestled among many other notices: in both case not a featured review but a second-tier mini-review. This makes the context amusing: among the more than a dozen other books with which the October 2nd piece shares the page is Steinbeck's OF MICE AND MEN and Rex Stout's THE RED BOX, one of the early Nero Wolfe novels. The October 8th piece similarly sits next to even shorter reviews of Hemingway's TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT and Charles Williams' DESCENT INTO HELL (and an ad for a book of James Thurber cartoons). A good example of how the coincidences of chronology remind us that we over-compartmentalize the things we know. How many people remember that Poe and Lincoln were the same age, or that Tolkien was born the same year as the Red Baron?

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

As "Trotter"'s comment makes clear, it's hard to get all the errata in one go. And of all errata, it's the omissions, the things that got left out, that are the hardest to spot. In proof of which, I forgot yesterday to mention one important omission from the Acknowledgments: my friend David Bratman's name should have been included among the participants in the Tolkien Symposiums whom I thank on page xxxiii. I've learned a lot from David's presentations, and I always look forward to them.

In addition, while it's not an errata, if there's another edition of the book down the road I'd certainly want to add a name to the acknowledgments on page xxxiv: that of Kate Latham, who saw the book through the final stages at the publisher's.

As for the point raised by "Trotter" in his comment, yes I should have specified that while THE TWO TOWERS came out in 1954, the second printing I use as a reference copy dates from 1955. In fact, I find it interesting that my copies of both THE TWO TOWERS and THE RETURN OF THE KING, which I picked up during a research trip to Oxford in May 1987, both originally belonged to the same person: one Jay O. Eastwick,* who bought them in Teheran in March 1956. I've long known about Stanley Unwin's enthusiasm for selling British books throughout the Empire (or Commonwealth, as it'd become by that time), but it's one thing to read about something in THE TRUTH ABOUT PUBLISHING or THE TRUTH ABOUT A PUBLISHER and quite another to come across first-hand evidence of his strategy in action.

Sunday, June 3, 2007

So, every author, editor, and proofreader knows that with every book there will inevitably be typos. No matter how many times you go over your work, there's always something that slips past into print. You hope that when you do find it, it'll be a relatively innocuous blunder, not something that makes you cringe.

Case in point:

Last night I was reading through the description of several new audiobooks in the Blackstone Audio catelogue, when I was bemused by the following synopsis of a new book on Mitt Romney (A MORMAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE?: 10 THINGS EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT MITT ROMNEY, by Hugh Hewitt, read by Lloyd James). It reads, in part, "Mitt Romney is a successful businessman and a fiscal and social conservative who won the governorship in one of the staunchest Republican states in America".

Massachusetts a staunchly Republican state? Since when?

This is of course the worst kind of error: one that appears in a perfectly grammatical sentence that makes sense, but happens to be completely wrong -- in this case, the exact opposite of the truth.

(1)In the case of MR. BAGGINS, I've found one example that fits this category: on page 260 I proudly draw attention to the fact that on Plate VI we printed the Tolkien drawing "Firelight in Beorn's House" in color for the first time ever.

Except we didn't. Due to an unfortunate mix-up on my part, the image that actually appears on Plate VI is in black & white, just like all the earlier reproductions (e.g., in THE ANNOTATED HOBBIT, ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR, &c.). So my text refers to what I thought the illustration would be, not to what actually appears in the book.

(2)A second error belongs to the embarrassingly obvious category: the dreaded "see page 000". There were several hundred such cross-references in the book, and one remained that way all the way into the published text, on page 356 of Volume One. Luckily, the reference isn't necessary to make sense of the passage; it's simply a self-evident glitch I wish we'd caught. [Note: For those who are interested, the missing page number(s) are 731 & 761, which discuss the circumstances in 1944 and 1947 that led up to the accidental second edition of 1951.]

(3)Third, there's one purely typographical error, on page 400; a hyphenated word that somehow got its second element capitalized ("ani-Mals" rather than "ani-mals"). I don't know quite how this happened, but while it looks a bit odd at least it doesn't affect the meaning of the passage from coming through.

(4)Finally, there's one error that only fellow editors are likely to catch: a word that should be in italics that wasn't. I refer of course to the second caption on Plate III, where the word "Below" should be italicized, like all the other signposts in this section.

* * * * * * * *

So far, that's the crop; if anyone finds more, please let me know. I did catch one in Part Two while completing the Index, hopefully in time for them to have made the change: in one place I'd used the name "Naugladur" where I meant to say "Nauglath" -- a simple slip on my part. We'll see.